The market for ultra rugged eSATA portable hard drives has to be pretty small, but hey, here at Maximum PC we're all about catering to a niche right? If your still with us then you might want to check out the LaCie Portable Bus Powered eSATA drive which unfortunately, currently only comes in a 500GB capacity.

The manufacturer promises write speeds of up to 90MB/s, and even offers up a trusty old USB 2.0 connection just in case you find yourself without access to eSATA. The transfer speeds and storage capacity of this drive definitely makes it a compelling product, but some might find the $240 price tag a bit on the high side.

Does the orientation of a hard drive correlate to its life expectancy? With a series of lovely grinding sounds, the 750GB Seagate hard drive in my Thecus NAS failed and all data was lost. The hard drive only lasted a little more than two years. The NAS (and thus the hard drive) stands upright, but in most desktops the hard drives lie flat. So, does the orientation effect the hard drive’s life expectancy? Are they manufactured to operate lying flat, upright, or does it matter?

Seagate on Tuesday said it has begun shipping what it claims is the "world's highest-capacity, most reliable small form factor enterprise drive," the Savvio 10K.4 HDD. As the model number suggests, this one spins at 10,000 RPM, but don't get too excited desktop denizens, this 600GB drive is destined for servers.

"Our customers face challenging storage needs requiring the most efficient use of space and power while maintaining the highest performance possible," said Howard Shoobe, senior manager, Dell Storage Product Management. "The new 2.5-inch 10K-rpm 600GB capacity point allows a doubling of capacity within the same rack space of current 3.5-inch 15K 600GB drives while increasing overall system-level performance and decreasing power usage."

The Savvio drives also come with either a 6Gbps SAS interface with dual-port communication, or a direct 4Gbps Fiber Channel connection. Other specs include 16MB of cache, a 4.6W power draw when idle, and various data protection and power saving features Seagate claims "can reduce the total cost of ownership to IT organizations and administrators."

Do you go for the speed of an SSD or the capacity of a traditional HDD? If you said 'both,' you're halfway to the finish line on this one. Silverstone's new HDDBoost gadget promises to take the best of both worlds, combine the two together, and yield up to a 70 percent increase in performance over that of an existing host hard drive.

The drive enclosure is compatible with most 2.5-inch SDDs and slides neatly into any available internal 3.5-inch drive bay. A SATA cable then connects the enclosure to a mechanical hard drive, and the device does the rest. There's no special software or drivers to muck around with, and it works with any OS tha supports a SATA interface.

Once everything's hooked up, the HDDBoost takes over and copies your most used files to the SSD, and then accesses them first whenever needed. By doing so, Silverstone claims a huge performance boost, all without sacrificing storage space.

Right now the device is only available in Japan and runs about $50. No word yet on when the company plans on shipping it to the U.S. market, but if the HDDBoost lives up to Silverstone's claims, we wouldn't be surprised to see it show up soon.

There's something green in the air this week, what with NEC announcing its carbon footprint conscious AS171 monitor, and Samsung introducing a new line of eco-friendly hard drives, the F3EG.

Sound familiar? That's because the EcoGreen F3EG series replaces the F2EG line, and with it bumps up the flagship model to a 2TB capacity consisting of four 500GB platters. By Samsung's math, that equates to 880 hours of DVD videor or 500,000 (or more) songs in MP3 format.

"Storage-hungry multimedia professionals, gamers, and home PC users contnue to increase the amount of video, music, photo, and other personal data they store and back-up," said In Cheol Park, vice president, Storage Sales, Samsung Electronics. "The F3EG delivers all the benefits of a low-power drive yet features high performance and is environmentally friendly."

Also in the eco-friendly F3EG mix is a 1.5TB model, and along with the 2TB drive, both boast Samsung's EcoTriangleTM technology comprised of low-power, low-noise components, and no halogen content.

We love finding uses for old hardware seeing as we go through so much of it. The hard drive clock is a classic. We’ve seen it, and like it, but it’s getting old. However, one intrepid modder at the Hacked Gadgets site has reaffirmed our faith in the concept of the hard drive clock.

The modder, known as NatureTM, created a clock made from a still spinning hard drive. The hands are actually created by a single line of LEDs in the spinning platter. With mad scientist level math skills, NatureTM programmed the controller to flash at intervals to make it appear that there were moving hands on the clock. He used an open hardware prototyping platform called Arduino to control the time display.

NatureTM plans to release code at some point. So before you know it you’ll be ruining hard drives trying this yourself. Hit the jump to check out the full video.

It's a new year, a new decade, with bigger hard disks than ever and new technologies like SATA 6Gbps, USB 3.0, and bigger solid-state drives to choose from. So, what do you do with the drives you've replaced (or will replace this year)? From drive enclosures and media streamers to storage for home servers and salvage fodder, find out the best ways to decide which drives get promoted, which drives are out, and which drives deserve a second life.

Kingston is refreshing their line of solid state drives with the SSDNow V+. The big advantage users will see in this generation of Kingston drives is support for TRIM. This should keep these pricey drives humming along smoothly throughout their life. The new drives also come in larger sizes, all the way from 64GB up to 512GB. The SSDNow V+ will be capable of 230MB/s read and 180MB/s write.

Kingston is offering a few options for interested customers. The bare OEM drive can be purchased, or for a few extra bucks there will be a bundle that comes with cloning software, a USB enclosure, cabling, and 2.5” to 3.5” mounting brackets. Pricing starts at $268 for the 64GB bare drive, and goes up to a dream shattering $1,969 for the 512GB. Tack on an extra $16 if you want the bundle, and really… at that point why be cheap?

It's a apparently a good time to be in the HDD business. Just as strong hard drive sales helped Seagate post healthy revenue numbers, the same holds true for Western Digital, which reported revenue of $2.6 billion for its second fiscal quarter ended January 1, 2010.

"We are very pleased with WD's strong financial performance in our second fiscal quarter," said John Coyne, president and chief executive officer. "For the third consecutive quarter, we increased output in a supply constrained environment, providing strong support of our customers' growth opportunities, primarily in the consumer segment but, notably, with some emerging strength in the commercial sector."

WD said it shipped 49.5 million hard drives during its fiscal second quarter, which helped result in net income of $429 million, or $1.85 per share. The company also generated a record $557 million in cash from operations, ending with total cash and cash equivalents of $2.4 billion, WD said.

I’ve often heard the rumor that a full hard drive is significantly slower than a mostly empty one. Despite my black belt Google-fu I am unable to find any stories, articles, or write-ups to elaborate on this. How much slower? At which point is a hard drive too full—60 percent? 90? When should I start looking for a bigger drive?